Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2)

by Gene Wolfe

Reading for world-building requires retaining information without context: a term, a place, a coin, a category comes up once and we know what that is—a puzzle piece—that our task is to gather up these pieces as the author drops them, and to slowly assemble the whole.

Before I had so much as opened any of the other volumes, I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind.